Sarah Recommends: “Spectre” by Radiohead

“I’m lost, I’m a ghost
dispossessed, taken host…
Futures tricked by the past
Spectre, how he laughs…”

One of the great joys of this year was seeing Radiohead live in July for the second time. I was hoping that they would play this, their song for the last James Bond movie, deemed “too dark” by film executives, and replaced with a weak Sam Smith piece called “The Writing’s on the Wall.” I’m pretty snotty when it comes to Bond music, and that the Radiohead song went unused was, at the time of the film’s release, hard to take. The song swoops upward, blooms dramatically, and then ends almost too soon. It’s hard to remember that it was written to time with an opening credits sequence.

For me though, it stands out because it haunts, as the best of their songs do, and in this past week, where our country has seen another woman coming forward with a shattering event from her past, only to be vilified and doubted, reminds me of my own ghosts; the ones I try to ignore, the ones I hope will go away, realizing that they’re haunting the wrong house, the ones that I finally have to accept in order to be whole.